Letter to Paul Lafargue, May 19, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 36, Moscow, 1964
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

IN PARIS

London, 19 May 1885

My dear Lafargue,

The Lissagaray affair pleased me greatly and I trust he will be chucked out of the Bataille.[1] The irony of history is without mercy, even to revolutionary stink-bugs.

I must repent, must repent me, Where my sins were most committed*

as good king Don Rodrigo said while snakes devoured his vital parts. Brousse at the head of a daily paper would be too comical, he would never last. It would be all he needed to cut his own throat.

The idea that life is simply the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies and that as a result the protein of the future, if the chemists ever contrive to manufacture it, must display signs of life, appears in my anti-Dühring book where it is developed to some extent on page 60, etc.[2] By assuming responsibility for it Schorlemmer did a bold thing, for if it falls flat, the blame will be his, whereas if it catches on, he will be the first to give me the credit.[3] Moreover your Grimaux must be an imbecile if he really said that

'we have nothing to show us how this initial movement is acquired whereby an albuminoid is organised into a living cell.'[4]

So the good man appears to be unaware that there is a whole army of living things which are still very far removed from the organisation of a cell, being no more than 'plasson', as Haeckel has it,[5] albuminoids that have no trace of organisation, yet are alive — for example protamoebas, siphonales, etc. The poor albuminoid has probably worked for millions of years in order to organise itself into a cell. But your Grimaux doesn't even see the point at issue. Moreover he betrays his ignorance of physiology still further by comparing with a primitive protoplasm, the source of all life on earth, a product as specialised as the egg of a vertebrate.

We have had poor Harney here for the past 10 days. He suffers badly from chronic rheumatoid arthritis of a more or less gouty nature. Nim has had her work cut out looking after him. If the weather improves he hopes to set off for Macclesfield on Saturday.[6] On that same Saturday we are expecting Sam Moore with his translation[7] — alas, as yet uncompleted.

The 2nd volume has been printed with the exception of my preface, the proofs of which should arrive any day. The consignments sent to Danielson have so far all arrived and 7 sheets have been translated.[8] I have dictated more than half of the 3rd volume, but two sections are going to give me a fine old time. The one on bank capital and credit is in such disorder as to strike terror into the heart of a better man than me, but that is how it is. I am now at land rent. It is quite superbly done. But this will entail even more work, for the manuscript dates from 1865 and I shall have to consult his extracts made between 1870 and 1878 both for the banks and for landed property in America and Russia. And there are not a few of them. This means that the 3rd volume will have to wait another year at least.

The storm in a teacup that has disrupted our ranks in Germany will doubtless calm down for the time being. Now that the Reichstag has been sent about its business, the gents of the 'socialist group' have dispersed. The Social Democrats have won a moral victory over the 'group'. But that is not the end of the matter and there may be a recurrence. Were it not for the Anti-Socialist Law,[9] I should have been in favour of an outright split. But so long as it is in force, it deprives us of all our weapons while enabling the party's petit-bourgeois section to reap all the benefit. And, in any case, it is not our business to provoke it. The thing was inevitable; it was bound to come sooner or later. But it would have come either later or under circumstances more favourable to ourselves had it not been for the incredible stupidities of Liebknecht, who has not only wavered between the two sections and invariably protected the petit bourgeois, but has also been prepared on more than one occasion to sacrifice the proletarian nature of the party for a simulacrum of unity that is credible to no one. It would appear that his own protégés, the representatives of the petit-bourgeois side, have now had enough of his double dealing. Liebknecht always believes what he says when he is saying it, but believes something quite different whenever he speaks to someone else. Over here he is all for revolution, over there all for circumspection. That won't prevent his being on our side on the crucial day and telling us: Didn't I always tell you so! This is between ourselves. A kiss for Laura.

Yours ever,

F. E.

  • Engels quotes in Spanish.
  1. ↑ The letter mentioned has not been found.
  2. ↑ F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, present edition, Vol. 25, pp. 15-11.
  3. ↑ The article by Louis-Edouard Grimaux referred to below ('Les substances colloïdales et la coagulation', Revue scientifique, Vol. XXXV, 1885) contains the following quote from Carl Schorlemmer, 'If chemists ever succeed in artificially obtaining proteins, they will be in the form of living protoplasm.' And later on, 'The enigma of life can only be resolved by protein synthesis.'
  4. ↑ E. Grimaux, 'Les substances colloïdales et la coagulation', Revue scientifique, No. 16, 18 April 1885, p. 500.
  5. ↑ E. Haeckel, Die Perigenesis der Plastidule..., Berlin, 1876, pp. 76, 77.
  6. ↑ 23 May; see also this volume, p. 292.
  7. ↑ of the first volume of Capital (see Note 56)
  8. ↑ To speed up the Russian translation of the second volume of Capital Engels sent Nikolai Danielson the proofs of the German edition as they were printed. The volume appeared in January 1886.
  9. ↑ The Exceptional Law Against the Socialists (Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie — the Law against the Harmful and Dangerous Aspirations of Social Democracy) was introduced by the Bismarck government, supported by the majority in the Reichstag, on 21 October 1878 to counter the socialist and workers' movement. This law, better known as the Anti-Socialist Law, made the Social-Democratic Party of Germany illegal, banned all party and mass workers' organisations, and the socialist and workers' press; on the basis of this law socialist literature was confiscated and Social Democrats subjected to reprisals. However, during its operation the Social-Democratic Party, assisted by Marx and Engels, uprooted both reformist and anarchist elements and managed to substantially strengthen and widen its influence among the people by skilfully combining illegal and legal methods of work. Under pressure from the mass workers' movement, the Anti-Socialist Law was abrogated on 1 October 1890. For Engels' assessment of this law, see his article 'Bismarck and the German Working Men's Party' (present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 407-09).